Third HEVC Patent Pool Launches With Ericsson, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Sharp & Sony
For content owners and broadcasters looking to adopt HEVC, two patent pools offered by MPEG LA and HEVC Advance have been offering licensing terms around HEVC patents for some time. But if dealing with two pools wasn’t already confusing enough, we now have a third pool that has entered the market. Launched in April, Velos Media has launched a new licensing platform that includes patents from Ericsson, Panasonic, Qualcomm Incorporated, Sharp and Sony.
As all these patents pool claim, Velos Media says they are making it “easy and efficient” to license from the “innovators that have made many of the most important contributions to the HEVC standard.” Of course, they also say that their pool “reduces transaction costs and time to market”, that their terms are “reasonable”, with “rates that will encourage further adoption of the technology.” For a pool that tries to sound professional, their website is a joke. It contains no real details of any kind, such as which patents are covered in the pool, by which companies. Nor does it give any details on what the licensing terms are or whom exactly they cover.
In their press release they make a mention of “device manufacturers” but give no other context of whom they are targeting. To make matters more confusing, Velos Media is being run by the Marconi Group, “an entity formed to create, launch and support new patent licensing platforms.” It’s clear Velos Media has no understanding of the market, doesn’t know the use cases and doesn’t realize the important of transparency when it comes to patent pools.
